Should Berkeley impose a moratorium on new housing?

[Brian Howell]

At lunch with Scott last week, he griped that Berkeley is in the midst of a mini-building boom. Several new apartment buildings are under construction and that their eventual occupants will significantly add to the congestion on the streets and sidewalks. I have to agree with that conclusion: as we discussed, traffic in Berkeley has become quite bad in the past few years; it can often take half an hour or longer to drive across it north to south during peak hours, far longer than in our salad days. And walking the sidewalks downtown—frequently crowded with students—can be a veritable bumper car ride to rival that of Manhattan's pedestrians.  But are limiting those impacts reasons enough to impose a building ban on new residential construction?

Cities across the U.S. are experiencing densification as Millennials flock back to the burgs that their grandparents fled. Many demographers and environmentalists think this is a good thing: urban dwellers typically use far fewer resources than suburban homeowners. Urban apartments house more people in less area; they generally require less energy to heat or cool and significantly less water as there are no individual lawns. And because their inhabitants tend to use public transportation at higher rates, they generally use much less gasoline.

Given the many environmental benefits, should Berkeley—and by extension San Francisco, Oakland, or other urban areas—impose strict controls on residential development for the benefit of those already living there? 

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/greenest_place_in_the_us_its_not_where_you_think/2203/

[jack saunders]

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2015/11/oakland-fifth-most-expensive-rental-uber-tech-twtr.html?ana=e_sfbt_rdup&s=newsletter&ed=2015-11-04&u=3oz1caUHw39tJ6saVDvegg03482340&t=1446653812

Oakland rents now 5th in the nation.  

SF is $3600 for ONE bedroom.  

It's very hard to do the roommate thing with one bedroom.  

So you're really looking $4K and up as a practical matter.

Dust off your old Sim City game.  Where are you going to put these people?  The answer is .... they put themselves wherever they can slide in.  

What's more obnoxious -- market building or market gaming?

Those boat smugglers in Europe have their analogs in apartment owners and condo converters.....who could give a rat's ass for what happens later.

I would have the Berkeley technocrats setting the standards and conditions for building ... rather than leave the city's future to the asymmetric bargaining power of landlords and tenants.

 

---

From: Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>
To: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 4, 2015 9:13 AM
Subject: [Ipse Dixit] Should Berkeley impose a moratorium on new housing?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ipse Dixit" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Ipse-dixit+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/Ipse-dixit/6770249f-ca08-49f1-b331-1768b20f47fe%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Scott Hotes]

The city of Berkeley can do what they want.

In talking to Brian, I was mostly griping (as Brian cogently put it) about the fact that traffic saturation in Berkeley has noticeably effected the quality of living/working here, and not in a good way.

I had not intended to really weigh-in on other considerations, like environmental impact, etc.  It's been long understood that city dwellers tend to have the least per-capita impact.  But as Jack points out, and I definitely agree, if you are going to expand as Berkeley is now doing, it should be through thoughtful planning, and not by finally giving when your arm is twisted.

I moved to Berkeley in 1987.  I imagine the transition was already happening, where Berkeley was changing from a wonderful city with a rich history and a unique combination of a cutting-edge university, quirky liberal population and truly international reputation for effecting change, to what it is now, a relatively conservative bedroom community for San Francisco and Silicon Valley with a university that has also become quite conservative.  North side and the Berkeley Hills are crammed with SUV's and other gas guzzling behemoths, filled with frenzied parents and their over-achieving children, dropping them off before getting to their white-collar jobs in the city.  1200 sq. foot houses on Sacramento and Cedar are selling for over $1M.  Service workers, like police and teachers, can't afford to live here, so they commute in from Pittsburgh.  Equally bad, most of these upper-class parents send their kids to private school, as Berkeley schools are no longer safe, let alone provide a quality education.

I'm not at all sure what Berkeley should or could have done to ward off this downward trend.  Maybe nothing.  The rise of Silicon Valley, and companies like Google paying 20-somethings RSU packages valued at $300K/yr and more, not to mention cash comp. represents a shock to society very hard to predict and even harder to rectify with the arc society had been on prior.  But all the same, it is a sad trend.  I know I sound like my dad right now when he was my age... :)

Scott

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/Ipse-dixit/1972689123.2254539.1446661127507.JavaMail.yahoo%40mail.yahoo.com.

[jack saunders]

Scott calls the future shock angle, quite rightly.  People are literally moving out of their homes in SF to catch the AirBB wave -- and why?  Because they suddenly have a machine that lets them do this, virtually day to day, as much hassle as they're willing to take for quick cash.  Deal with it.  I'm glad the hysterical ballot measures trying to control it went down, but the future shock problems remain unsolved. A new world.  He with the best apps gets the best stuff.  

I moved out of Berkeley after grad school in the mid 70s because I didn't like having to move my car every few hours.  Congestion in Berkeley is not new.

 

---

From: Scott Hotes <sah...@gmail.com>
To: jack saunders <jack...@pacbell.net>
Cc: Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>; Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 4, 2015 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] Should Berkeley impose a moratorium on new housing?

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/Ipse-dixit/CAC7%2BDACNWYEHN0ZEXMc%2BnB5YuL%3DQgc1JewqrWM9Oicm-o5fFxg%40mail.gmail.com.